My oldest son turned 11 this month, and he put a lot of thought into the kind of party he wanted. One option would have been a party at the local swimming pool, another was a couple of hours at a ninja warrior gym.
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In the end he decided on a laser tag party, one of the more digital options available. Imagine an indoor obstacle course that is set in near-darkness, with about a dozen kids wearing harnesses and carrying toy rifles which use infrared lights that emit light as strong directional beams (i.e., not literal lasers). If your beam finds the sensor on an opponent’s harness, it registers as a hit and the opponent is either weakened or knocked out of the game.
However, what sold my son on this particular facility were the dozens of free video games that lined the walls of at least three other rooms, from tank and robot battles to fighting games like Mortal Kombat. It was a digital play paradise that Aldous Huxley would have been proud to imagine.
However, when time was up and the party was over, where did I find my son and his friends? They had found a massive room at the back of the complex and were happily trying to brain each other in a game of dodge ball—easily the most analog thing available to them.
Thomas Wilk joined Plant Services as editor in chief in 2014. Previously, Wilk was content strategist / mobile media manager at Panduit. Prior to Panduit, Tom was lead editor for Battelle Memorial Institute's Environmental Restoration team, and taught business and technical writing at Ohio State University for eight years. Tom holds a BA from the University of Illinois and an MA from Ohio State University.
It has felt like that this past month on Plant Services, as I attended the ARC Industry Forum, with the theme Accelerating Industrial Digital Transformation and Sustainability, while simultaneously editing articles that focus on the preventive side of maintenance.
This month’s cover story is from industry guru George Williams, who starts with the surprising statistic that only about 1% of U.S. plants are supported by a reliability engineer. From there, George proposes real-world ways organizations can relieve the pressure on current workforce capacity while improving PM effectiveness, all under the umbrella concept “PM Uptimization.” George and his ReliabilityX partner Joe Anderson also tackle PM optimization in their Assets Anonymous podcast series. In fact, Episode 3 provides recommendations on how to break out of reactive PM cycles.
The keynotes and sessions at the ARC Industry Forum were a drastic change in the digital direction, as Andrew Obin, research analyst for Bank of America, observed that software has become more and more central to what industrial automation companies do, to the point where currently “manufacturing spends more on software than on equipment to make things.” And Dustin Olson, the COO of PureCycle, noted in his keynote the challenge of getting teams to believe in the promise of digital technologies, but added that “if we don’t do digital now, it’s going to be tremendously more difficult in the future.”
Of course this is not an either-or choice—sometimes you play laser tag, and sometimes you follow the five D’s of dodgeball. Just do your best not to get whacked in the face either way.
This story originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of Plant Services. Subscribe to Plant Services here.
This article is part of our monthly From the Editor column. Read more from Thomas Wilk.
